I just finished a project with my middle school music tech students, which had them making their own chiptune themes. I really enjoyed the process of testing out the project myself, as well as hearing what the students made. I think it’s an effective music tech project for a couple reasons. First, you can setup the project in a way to provide the students with a framework of useful creative constraints to guide the process. Additionally, many of the students are active gamers or at least have a cursory experience with videogames, so the chiptune style and sound pallette is familiar and creatively inspiring.
You can find a basic definition of chiptune music on Wikipedia:
“Chiptune, also known as chip music or 8-bit music, is a style of synthesized electronic music made using the programmable sound generator (PSG) sound chips or synthesizers in vintage arcade machines, computers and video game consoles.”
As you listen to and read more about chiptune music, it becomes clear that style is “more about the choice of instrumental sounds, timbres and the methods of production.” In other words, any type of genre or song could be produced in a chiptune style. This point is really helpful when teaching the project because it can allow students to bring a variety of genre preferences to the chiptune music they create. Also, a quick Google search reveals there is a variety of chiptune music being created and the style has evolved in many ways beyond its videogame based roots.
For this particular project though, I like to begin with connecting chiptune music in its association with video game original soundtracks (OSTs). According to Wikipedia, the first video game to feature continuous melodic background music was Rally-X, an arcade game released by Namco in 1980.
I think it’s also a good idea to spend some time having students listen to some of the iconic Nintendo songs from the 8-bit era, and sharing some of their own favorites. One of my own favorites to listen to and discuss is “Eternal Wind” from Final Fantasy III.
The 8-bit era songs a great for asking the students some questions to draw their attention toward characteristics that will be helpful when they begin creating their own music. For example, I begin with three basic questions:
– What mood does the music evoke?
– How many different sounds/parts do you hear?
– What is each sound doing? How does it change over time?
Depending on the feedback from the student, you might have to adjust to ask more specific or general questions. Some of the goals of these questions are to draw students’ attention to the affective qualities of music, the roles of the different parts (e.g. lead melody and accompaniment), and the structure or form of the music (many of the 8-bit era use a simple ABA form) .
Moving on from there, we start talking about how the students will make their own chiptune style music. I recommend that first the students think about what type of mood they want to aim for with their music. Is the music going to evoke the peaceful exploration, the beginning of an adventure, an intense boss battle?
Then, I provide students with an Ableton Live Set that has three tracks and two scenes set up in Session View. There are two chiptune synth tracks which feature a stock Ableton synth “Vintage Saw Keys” + Redux device. The third track is a drum rack of 8-bit drum samples. The two scenes are labelled A and B to help organize the form of the music after the initial clips of ideas are made. No Ableton Live? Try using Beepbox.co which is web-based and works on Chromebooks.
The basic goal of the project is for the students to create a chiptune track that evokes a coherent mood with both a melody and accompaniment, and arranged in ABA song form. I give the students structured guide that they can follow as they move through the creative process, so that by the end they hopefully have a baseline level of successful sounding project. They begin by creating an “A scene” of a four bar melody with a synth or drum accompaniment, followed by a “B scene.” Once they have the Session View organized and sounding good, they can move to the Arrangement View quickly making a form: Intro – A – B – A – B – A – Outro. I also end up spending a lot of time throughout the duration of the project listening and giving feedback to students a long the way, whether it be about certain musical elements or Ableton-specific production techniques.
You can click below to download the Ableton template project that I created.
And my own demo project here:
Michael Ferraro 